It is proposed to inquire into the principles of this confederacy, and to make a few brief suggestions on its origin and history. In the time that has been given me, I have had but little opportunity for research, and even this little, other engagements, have not permitted me, fully to employ. The little that I have to offer, would indeed have been confined to the reminiscence of former reading, had I not been called, the present season, to make a personal visit to the reservation still occupied by the principal tribes. 1. Prominent in its effects on the rise and progress of nations, in the geographical diameter of the country they occupy. And in this respect, the Iroquois were singularly favored. They lived under an atmosphere the most genial of any in the temperate latitude. Equally free from the extremes of heat, and humidity, it has been found eminently favorable to human life. Inquiries into the statistics of vitality will abundantly denote this. Many of the civil sachems lived to a great age. And the same may be said of those warriors who escaped the dart and club, until they came to the period, not a very advanced one, when they ceased to follow the war path. They possessed a country, unsurpassed for its various advantages, not only on this continent, but on the globe.--It afforded a soil of the most fruitful kind, where they could, with ease and certainty, always cultivate their maize. Its forests abounded in the deer, elk, bear and other animals, whose flesh supplied their lodges. It was irrigated by some of the sublimest rivers of the continent, whose waters ran south and north, east, and by the Alleghanies, west, till they all found their level, at distant points, either in the Gulfs of St. Lawrence and Mexico, or in the intermediate shores of the Atlantic. Lakes of an amazing size, compared to those of Europe, bounded this territory on the north and north east. Its own bosom, was spotted, with secondary sheets of water, like that of the Cayuga, upon whose banks we are assembled. These added freshness and beauty to the thick, and almost unbroken continuity of these forests. Nations doubtless owe some of their characteristics to the natural scenes of their country, and if we grant the same influence to the red sons of the forest, they had sources of animating and elevating thoughts around them.--Men who habitually cast their views to the Genesee and the Niagara--who crossed in their light canoe, the Ontario and Erie, wending their way into the sublime vista of the upper lakes: men, who threaded these broad forests in search of the deer, or who descended the powerful and rapid channels of the Alleghany, the Susquehanna, the Delaware and the St. Lawrence, in quest of their foes, must have felt the influence of magnitude and creative grandeur, and could not but originate ideas favorable to liberty and personal independence. Their very position, became thus the initiatory step in their assent to power.